In “Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken,” Paley includes the following assignments in her list of “about fifteen things I might say in the course of a term. To freshmen or seniors. To two people or a class of twenty.”

“Write a story, a first-person narrative in the voice of someone with whom you’re in conflict. Someone who disturbs you, worries, you, someone you don’t understand. Use a situation you don’t understand.”

This is far from the typical creative writing inverse of that traditional imperative, write what you know. Standpoint is central to Paley’s feminist poetics; in “Imagining the Present,” Paley acknowledges the activist motivations behind her signature ability to inhabit the voices of others. She writes, “First of all, we need our imaginations to understand what is happening to other people around us, to try to understand the lives of others. I know there’s a certain political view that you mustn’t write about anyone except yourself, your own exact people. […] The idea of writing from the head or from the view or the experience of other people, of another people, of another life, or even of just the people across the street or next door, is probably one of the most important acts of imagination that you can try and that can be useful to the world.” Paley uses what Freire terms “problem-posing” to prompt her students to write about that which they do not understand because the task of writing from the standpoint of another/an other yields an interest in the lives and conditions of others. This type of writing practice produces political subjectivities because “Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming––as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality” (Freire 85).

“Tell a story in class, something that your grandmother told you about a life that preceded yours. That will remind us of your home language.”

As a teacher of writing, Paley clearly endorses a democratization of language reflected in her own colloquial, dialogue-driven short stories. The idea of a “home language” is key to Paley’s aesthetic sensibilities but also embodies the interventions she sought to make on the hegemonic aims served by the orthodoxies of language and literature education. Earlier in “Some Notes on Teaching,” Paley presents her position. “Literature has something to do with language. There’s probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you’ll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren’t a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of schoolteachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage.” Paley encouraged her students to hear, preserve and even relearn those natural grammars––necessary for the existence of a diverse, empathetic society––as a way of taking back the power to create knowledge from the ruling class.

“At Christmas time or Passover supper, extract a story from the oldest persons told them by the oldest person they remember. That will remind us of history.”

Listening, for Paley, is the primary political undertaking of the storyteller; to hear is the mechanism for grasping and then later amplifying the voices ordinarily left out of dominant narratives. Many scholars have located Paley’s fiction in the oral tradition––nods have been made to her cultural affinity for the orality of Jewish humor––but there is also a writing and teaching philosophy that undergirds Paley’s emphasis on oral storytelling and the listening that oils its engine. Paley takes issue with “the separation between the spoken word and the written word,” to be sure, because that gap linguistically signifies and maintains inequality and continues the devaluation of diversity. What the oral tradition enables is communication or dialogue, a key to love, which is, for Freire, the only way to liberate the oppressed from their oppression.

“It’s possible to write about anything in the world, but the slightest story ought to contain the facts of money and blood in order to be interesting to adults. That is, everybody continues on this earth by courtesy of certain economic arrangements; people are rich or poor, make a living or don’t have to, are useful to systems or superfluous. And blood––the way people live as families or outside families or in the creation of family, sisters, sons, fathers, the blood ties.”

Paley believes stories serve a sociopolitical purpose; whether in hyperlocal or geopolitical terms, the writer of stories should address the dynamics and systems in which all lived experiences take place. This means, without mention of Marx or Foucault or any particular theorist at all, Paley invites her students to face certain material realities that frame positionality: class, social relations, arrangements and institutions, work, family structures, gender roles, power differentials and inequality.

“Invent a person––that is, name the characteristics and we will write about him or her.”

What is the significance of this seemingly ordinary collaboration between peers, in which a subject is invented by one and then built by many others? Questions Freire poses on the topics of dialogue and humility help unpack Paley’s subtly subversive exercise. Freire asks, “How can I dialogue if I am closed to––and even offended by––the contributions of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness? Self-sufficiency is incompatible with dialogue. Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world. […] Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more full human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all)” (90). The prompt to create a world together, then, is also an exercise in humility, in recognition of the humanity of others, in relinquishing any desires to uphold the structures that allow for power differentials to determine by whom knowledge is created and kept.